For her edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Anne Imhof has reproduced a motif from her award-winning work for this year’s Venice Biennale. The silkscreen print measuring 31 x 42 inches is a portrait of the artist Eliza Douglas, who plays a central part in many of Imhof’s performances, including “Faust,” the five-hour piece that opened at the German pavilion earlier this month. Produced in and around a glass construction inserted into the pavilion, the work goes beyond scambling classical regions of the theater to establish a stage from which there is no retreat, a place of totalizing surveillance; “Faust” also invokes various motifs of what is “German” in pop (not to be confused with pop in German; think Joy Division, not Rammstein).

In the almost life-size picture, Douglas’s naked upper body is half concealed by her cocked leg; a tattooed letter A appears on her shoulder; her mouth is open, perhaps she is singing. Yet her gaze is provocatively trained on the camera, arrested the beholder; Douglas draws her in only to also confront her.

The print is – which is based on a photograph taken by Nadine Fraczkowski during the „Faust“ rehearsals – appears as part of Imhof’s Venice installation. The temporal and spatial boundaries between making art and doing nothing with friends, between being exhibited and solitude dissolve. With this silver-gray portrait of Douglas, Imhof may seem to be picking up on the possible comparison of her practice to the Factory: with Douglas appearing, here, as a latter day Edie Sedgwick.